How Employees Can Make or Break Engagement for Their Team

When it comes to making sure that your employees are happy and engaged, is the whole more than the sum of its parts?

According to our 2016 Best Industry Ranking Report, the answer is yes. Employees in the industries with the highest happiness scores report having great people around them on the job. Take a look at how they compare to employees from the industries with the lowest happiness scores:

If we go to the Consumer Products & Services industry, the one that topped the happiness list, we find this employee who has plenty of praise for their teammates:

“Love my colleagues and team members. I am often inspired by them and motivated by their commitment, follow-through, intelligence, and willingness to help.”

Who wouldn’t want their great employees to motivate one another in being even better?

On the flip side, having bad colleagues is huge drawback: employees also said that a lack of follow-through from coworkers is the number one productivity killer in our 2015 Employee Engagement Report. Here's what one employee in Manufacturing — one of the industries at the bottom of the happiness list — had to say:

“Management excluded, my colleagues know less, care less, do far less, are responsible for less, but on average get paid more. I stay focused on my own work, with a positive attitude, make the best of my situation [...]”

So don't forget when you're working on employee engagement to give your attention to the team as a whole and how its members work together. They're an essential piece of the puzzle.

This post was written by Dora Wang

Dora is an employee engagement researcher for TINYpulse and managing editor of TINYinstitute. Having grown up in Texas, she is now firmly settled in Seattle, where she spends her free time reading comic books, wrangling her three cats, and (of course) rooting for the Seahawks.